


Future / Imperfect

by The_Exile



Category: Sonic the Hedgehog - All Media Types
Genre: Bad Ending, Community: tic_tac_woe, Environment, Gen, Robots, Sonic CD, Time Loop, ties in to other fics and headcanons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-07
Updated: 2017-12-07
Packaged: 2019-02-11 18:01:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12940716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Exile/pseuds/The_Exile
Summary: Sonic tires of trying and failing over and over again, so he tries to think of a different approach.





	Future / Imperfect

**Author's Note:**

> written for bingo square 'Pollution'. 
> 
> this is a prequel to a fic I wrote where there is a crazy cyborg Sonic living voluntarily in the bad Future who may or may not be turning into Metal Sonic

Time and space shimmered.

A mechanical shell spread over the glittering planet like the web that a spider wraps around its captured prey. Once again, a chain appeared, tethering the wandering planet to the larger sphere and the hellish factory that even now teleported robots into the planet to begin its conversion into a useful deposit of resources for Robotnik' s master plan of interplanetary domination.

Sonic didn't need to turn around to see that it had happened again, even as he somersaulted and landed in a crouch to break his fall. He could busy tell, by now. There was an electric roaring sound and an ozone stench as time reset, a feeling of wrongness in his soul as fate rejected changes to it.

He had given up counting how many times it had happened. Time had ceased to have meaning, it had reset so many times, and for all he knew, he had broken time altogether.

He had come to the conclusion that some things you couldn't put back together no matter how many times you tried. Maybe something fundamental had been broken one time too many, what with both sides constantly using the impossibly vast energy reserves of the chaos emeralds, and now the time stones, to bend reality in ways it didn't bend. Then there were the dumb things Robotnik tried to do even when he didn't have mystical energy to play with. Like ruin a planet for no reason, even when it would have made him more money and produced resources more efficiently to hold back a little. Sometimes Sonic didn't even know what Robotnik was trying to achieve any more. He wondered if the mad scientist himself even knew.

The devastation was back again, and the smell hit him in the face as soon he stepped onto the planet's surface, the cloying rotten stench of corrupted air and dying plant life combined with the rusting, abandoned machinery around it. The trees didn't seem to have been cut down to build anything, a lot of them were mechanised - badly, hurriedly - in ghoulish experiments. The water in the caves was brown with toxic overflow from the mines above, where the mining equipment had been overclocked so badly they had accidentally drilled into a lava vein and the whole thing was on the verge of collapse. The factories that the mine was presumably supposed to serve were also falling apart from lack of maintenance and the lights of the city where the workers were housed were all flickering a dim magenta as the power depleted.

What the hell had Robotnik tried to build here? Was he over-intensively harvesting the planet to quickly move on to the next one? If so, why build more robots than he required, and why chain the planet if he could use it to travel to another? 

Maybe Robotnik just hated planets, hated life, hated space and time. He created a lot of random crap for someone totally nihilistic, though... Hell, maybe he was just irreversibly insane from all the experimental cybernetics he probably shoved up his nose.

A faulty mining robot mistook Sonic for a rock and tried to punch a drill through his head, so the hedgehog casually backflipped and smacked it hard, cracking its shell. It sparked and smoked and went still. Flower seeds leaked out and immediately found cracks in what remained of the thin, dry soil. They sparkled as they sprouted in three seconds, flourishing with colourful petals. As fast as me, Sonic thought with a smile, and as pig-headed when it comes to survival in hopeless situations.

There was another kind of life in the place, too, he realised. Another robot, not quite as faulty, inspected its fallen comrade, whacked it with a stick, then kicked it into a mine shaft, before wandering off again, drinking from an oil can and complaining about how the oil was running out. Okay, so they mostly weren't very nice to each other but, as far as Sonic could tell from his limited understanding of robot communication, they had invented the concept of 'if nobody is paying me for working or punishing me for not working, I don't need to do my crappy job', so they were clearly developing some semblance of common sense.

Maybe this place could be dragged back, he thought as he shoved the robot away from the flowers before it could trample them. It beeped and swore at him. With time, a lot of time, it could even be the way it was. Or it could evolve into something new.

The factory had a control core somewhere, and, assuming the fat idiot hadn't literally eaten or set fire to them all, the extracted resources had to have been stored somewhere as well. 

Sonic had an idea. An idea involving less pain, less frustration and most importantly, less time travel.


End file.
